Kick Starter and making the film

[detbear]

Hello everyone.

 

I had some thoughts today about artists and their potential works.

Specifically I was thinking about the kickstarter world and all the projects

that have had the dreaded "Funding Unsuccessful."

 

By no means does this mean the project is unsuccessful!!!! But it has to be a real downer to

put one's heartfelt work out there and have it seemingly rejected by the world.

 

Kickstarter, although a clever way to get a project done, should by no means be viewed as a "Project Killer."

 

O.K. ......So maybe the thing might need more work......Maybe people need to learn more about it or see it

a little closer to finished quality. Maybe people need to know more about you...the artist. BUT is the project

all of a sudden a shelved failure???? NOT AT ALL.

 

When I started out on my half hour pilot, I had 3 very clear things going through my head constantly:

1.I can do this.

2.Is this really worth the time and money I'm spending.

3.How am I ever gonna get all this done.

 

This went on for years(Literally).....2007-2010

 

Then one day, I rendered the final frame and sent the final 28 minute edit to print. There was no such thing as Kick starter. If it was, maybe the film would have never been completed.

 

Looking Back at it makes me realize how laughably bad it is at parts, but you know what......I'm so glad that I was able to work through

all the head aches and days I wanted to quit it all.

 

Don't give up on your dreams of making that project happen. You may have to pace yourself. It may take longer. You may have to spend some money.

But don't give up.

 

William

[zandoriastudios]

It does give you pause when your kickstarter falls flat. Especially when you are raising money for a film, because that film is intended to be shown/sold to an audience (right?)

So after my kickstarter, I had to wonder if TAR was such an awesome project because the response was very tepid as I wrote about here.

 

I have continued to work on it, but I have really spun out... I am at a loss for meaning, I can't answer for myself "why" I am making it, and I can't even delude myself that an audience is waiting for it.

[largento]

It's a tough nut to crack and I think it's going to be more and more how independent creative projects get funded down the line.

 

I think the important thing to realize is that almost without exception, the folks getting tons of dough from Kickstarter have a pre-existing audience, either of fans or acquaintances. I just don't think Kickstarter delivers that many discoverers.

 

As much as I fell into that same trap, I think Kickstarter works best when you can almost entirely do the project yourself and just need a little bit of help financially. My first one went that way and was a great experience. I was already a third of the way through making the movie and just needed money to print DVDs. Only needing to raise $600 meant that I was able to raise it quickly and everything over was just encouragement.

 

Contrastingly, I went into the second one thinking bigger and got burned. At the same time I was asking for $5K for The Wobbling Dead, a bunch of guys here in Dallas were also pitching an animated project for $250K. Mine was only successful because one guy came in at the last minute and donated way too much. (I was already resolved that it would fail.) Those other guys ended up with over $770K! And they weren't even going to do the animation. But, theirs was an animated version of their successful stick figure webcomic. They had over 14K backers, I had 63.

 

I say I got burned because I was really more interested in the success of The Wobbling Dead than in wanting to make it myself. When it became clear I wasn't going to reach my goal, I more or less moved on from it. So when suddenly it did meet the goal, I found myself kind of trapped. Now I have to do the movie and yet I'm also aware that it's not going to have much of an audience. It really makes it tough to keep working on it everyday.

 

My point in saying this, is that although there's the temptation to use Kickstarter as a gauge of success or a get-rich-quick scheme, the reality is that you have to love the project that you want to do whether or not anybody else does. You are the one who is going to have to do the really hard parts.

[Gerry]

I feel like I *should* add something here since I've had experience with KS as well, but in truth I was really relieved when my KS failed because I was not eager to take time away from creating the project to think up, create and distribute the "rewards".

 

In addition my project was not to become a finished, consumer-oriented thing but was just a sample animation to pitch my project to broadcasters, and given the experience I had at the Kidscreen conference, which was invaluable, the sample animation wouldn't have helped in the least.

 

One of the questions I was asked at the conference, which really helped put my project in perspective, was whether I wanted to be an animator or a show creator. You can't realistically do both unless you're bound and determined to wear all the hats. Of course I wanted to be a show creator, in which case presenting sample animation is completely beside the point. It makes more sense to create a bible, character designs, a script and/or an animatic. Presenting animation that wasn't 110% broadcast quality turned out to be a big drawback.